Featherstone notes that Bernie Sanders, the only major candidate with a positive net favorability with both women and men, “is able to channel some of the aggression that men feel in general, and sometimes with good reason, about politics. … A lot of men are very disenfranchised and mad about it, and Sanders is mad about it too. And he has a personal style that doesn’t hide that. He’s pretty tough.”

Several weeks before the election, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 51 percent of white working-class voters did not believe that Mr. Trump had a “sense of decency” and ranked Mrs. Clinton slightly higher on that quality.

But they were not voting on decency. Indeed, one-fifth of voters — more than 25 million Americans — said they “somewhat” disapproved of Mr. Trump’s treatment of women. Mr. Trump won three-quarters of these voters, despite their disapprobation.

Bluntly put, much of the white working class decided that Mr. Trump could be a jerk. Absent any other champion, they supported the jerk they thought was more on their side — that is, on the issues that most concerned them.

And anti-immigrant blowback, for instance, was not what unified them. Mr. Trump proposed expelling illegal immigrants yet more of his voters, by a 50 percent to 45 percent margin, said illegal immigrants working here should be offered a chance to apply for legal status rather than be deported.

The U.S. went from 30% of its nonfarm employees in manufacturing to 12% because of rapid growth in manufacturing productivity and limited demand, yes?

The U.S. went from 12% to 9% because of stupid and destructive macro policies–the Reagan deficits, the strong-dollar policy pushed well past its sell-by date, too-tight monetary policy–that diverted it from its proper role as a net exporter of capital and finance to economies that need to be net sinks rather than net sources of the global flow of funds for investment, yes?

The U.S. went from 9% to 8.7% because of the extraordinarily rapid rise of China, yes?

The U.S. went from 8.7% to 8.6% because of NAFTA, yes?

And yet the American political system right now is blaming all, 100%, every piece of that decline from 30% to 8.6% and every problem that can be laid its door on brown people from Mexico.